Argonne to lead National Energy Storage Research Hub

by Clarence Oxford

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Sep 05, 2024

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has selected Argonne National Laboratory to lead the newly established Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA), a national hub focused on advancing energy storage technologies. The ESRA, co-led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is one of two new Energy Innovation Hubs announced by the DOE.

Bringing together nearly 50 leading researchers from three national laboratories and 12 universities, ESRA aims to address the most critical challenges in battery technology, such as safety, high-energy density, and the development of long-duration storage solutions using cost-effective and abundant materials. The initiative is designed to push the boundaries of energy storage science, fostering innovation and strengthening the competitive edge of the U.S. in this crucial field.

“The demand for high-performance, low-cost and sustainable energy storage devices is on the rise, especially those with potential to deeply decarbonize heavy-duty transportation and the electric grid,” stated Shirley Meng, ESRA director and chief scientist at the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. “To achieve this, energy storage technology must reach levels of unprecedented performance, surpassing the capabilities of current lithium-ion technology. The key to making these transformative leaps lies in a robust research and development initiative firmly grounded in basic science.”

Leveraging decades of investment in fundamental science, ESRA will focus on transformative discoveries in materials chemistry, a deeper understanding of electrochemical processes at the atomic level, and establishing the scientific foundations necessary for major advancements in energy storage technology.

“ESRA creates an energy storage research ecosystem with the mission to rapidly innovate, shorten the time between basic discovery and technology development, and train the next-generation workforce,” commented Bryan McCloskey, ESRA deputy director for scientific thrusts and a faculty engineer at Berkeley Lab.

The success of ESRA’s efforts will lead to the development of high-energy batteries that are fire-resistant, capable of providing long-duration storage for multiple days, have a lifespan of several decades, and are constructed from low-cost, widely available materials.

“ESRA will pave the way for innovative energy storage solutions that drive both U.S. prosperity and security,” said Argonne Director Paul Kearns. “As the lead laboratory for ESRA under the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Argonne takes pride in spearheading this collaborative effort that unites world-leading experts and taps the impressive scientific resources available in national labs and academia.”

The DOE has committed up to $62.5 million in funding for ESRA over the next five years.

In addition to its research goals, the Argonne-led hub will prioritize training a diverse, next-generation battery workforce to meet future manufacturing demands. This will be achieved through innovative training programs that involve industry, academia, and government partnerships.

“Cultivating a diverse workforce dedicated to safeguarding America’s energy resilience is key to ESRA’s mission,” noted Wei Wang, ESRA deputy director for crosscuts and director of the Energy Storage Materials Initiative at PNNL. “Through our strategic equity and inclusion initiatives, we plan to create a robust training ground for energy storage science from the undergraduate to postdoctoral levels.”

With Berkeley Lab and PNNL as co-leads, the ESRA collaboration brings together comprehensive expertise across the energy storage spectrum. Their state-of-the-art capabilities in technology discovery, modeling and simulation, and materials synthesis and characterization complement those of Argonne, setting the stage for significant advancements in energy storage.

Argonne is joined by 14 partners in this initiative, all of whom are deeply involved in ESRA’s scientific endeavors, governance, strategic development, and the training of the next generation of battery scientists and engineers. This collaboration among national laboratories and universities is vital for discovering new materials, accelerating the development of technology, and commercializing new energy storage innovations.

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Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science

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Major Qatari plant to double solar capacity by 2030: minister

by AFP Staff Writers

Doha (AFP) Sept 1, 2024

A large new solar plant planned in Qatar will double the Gulf emirate’s previously projected renewable energy capacity by 2030, Qatari Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi announced on Sunday.

The photovoltaic farm, which will be built in the Dukhan area some 80 kilometres (50 miles) west of the capital Doha, will increase the gas-rich state’s solar production capacity to four gigawatts by the end of the decade, Kaabi said.

The plant “that will be established in Dukhan area will produce 2,000 megawatts, which is twice more than the capacity of Qatar’s production of solar energy of the current projects,” the minister, who is also chief executive of state-owned QatarEnergy, said.

In October 2022, Qatar inaugurated its first large-scale solar farm at al-Kharsaah, west of Doha. The emirate announced in August of the same year another solar project with two plants at Ras Laffan in the north.

Through the combined projects, including at Dukhan, Qatar would achieve “4,000 megawatts of clean energy by 2030”, Kaabi said.

This will “constitute 30 percent of the total production of energy of the state of Qatar” with a yearly reduction of “4.7 million tonnes of CO2 emissions,” he added.

Kaabi said the existing projects should produce 1.7 gigawatts of energy “in first quarter of next year, or early next year”.

The energy minister also announced plans to more than double Qatar’s urea production making the country the largest producer of the fertiliser in the world by the end of the decade.

He said Qatar would “maximise the production of chemical fertilisers” through “a complex with global standards” which would “increase our production capacity from 6 million tonnes annually to more than 12.4 million tonnes annually”.

Qatar is one of the world’s top liquefied natural gas producers alongside the United States, Australia and Russia. Natural gas is a major ingredient in urea manufacturing.

In February, Qatar announced plans to expand its output from its North Field project, saying it will boost capacity to 142 million tonnes per year before 2030.

Over the past year, Qatar has inked a series of long-term LNG deals with France’s Total, Britain’s Shell, India’s Petronet, China’s Sinopec and Italy’s Eni among others.

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Researchers discover a surprising way to jump-start battery performance

by Glennda Chui for SLAC News

Stanford CA (SPX) Sep 01, 2024

A lithium-ion battery’s very first charge is more momentous than it sounds. It determines how well and how long the battery will work from then on – in particular, how many cycles of charging and discharging it can handle before deteriorating.

In a study published in Joule, researchers at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center report that giving batteries this first charge at unusually high currents increased their average lifespan by 50% while decreasing the initial charging time from 10 hours to just 20 minutes.

Just as important, the researchers were able to use scientific machine learning to pinpoint specific changes in the battery electrodes that account for this increase in lifespan and performance – invaluable insights for battery manufacturers looking to streamline their processes and improve their products.

The study was carried out by a SLAC/Stanford team led by Professor Will Chueh in collaboration with researchers from the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Washington. It is part of SLAC’s sustainability research and a broader effort to reimagine our energy future leveraging the lab’s unique tools and expertise and partnerships with industry.

“This is an excellent example of how SLAC is doing manufacturing science to make critical technologies for the energy transition more affordable,” Chueh said. “We’re solving a real challenge that industry is facing; critically, we partner with industry from the get-go.”

This was the latest in a series of studies funded by TRI under a cooperative research agreement with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

The results have practical implications for manufacturing not just lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and the electric grid, but for other technologies, too, said Steven Torrisi, a senior research scientist at TRI who collaborated on the research.

“This study is very exciting for us,” he said. “Battery manufacturing is extremely capital, energy and time intensive. It takes a long time to spin up manufacturing of a new battery, and it’s really difficult to optimize the manufacturing process because there are so many factors involved.”

Torrisi said the results of this research “demonstrate a generalizable approach for understanding and optimizing this crucial step in battery manufacturing. Further, we may be able to transfer what we have learned to new processes, facilities, equipment and battery chemistries in the future.”

A “squishy layer” that’s key to battery performance

To understand what happens during the battery’s initial cycling, Chueh’s team builds pouch cells in which the positive and negative electrodes are surrounded by an electrolyte solution where lithium ions move freely.

When a battery charges, lithium ions flow into the negative electrode for storage. When a battery discharges, they flow back out and travel to the positive electrode; this triggers a flow of electrons for powering devices, from electric cars to the electricity grid.

The positive electrode of a newly minted battery is 100% full of lithium, said Xiao Cui, the lead researcher for the battery informatics team in Chueh’s lab. Every time the battery goes through a charge-discharge cycle, some of the lithium is deactivated. Minimizing those losses prolongs the battery’s working lifetime.

Oddly enough, one way to minimize the overall lithium loss is to deliberately lose a large percentage of the initial supply of lithium during the battery’s first charge, Cui said. It’s like making a small investment that yields good returns down the road.

This first-cycle lithium loss is not in vain. The lost lithium becomes part of a squishy layer called the solid electrolyte interphase, or SEI, that forms on the surface of the negative electrode during the first charge. In return, the SEI protects the negative electrode from side reactions that would accelerate the lithium loss and degrade the battery faster over time. Getting the SEI just right is so important that the first charge is known as the formation charge.

“Formation is the final step in the manufacturing process,” Cui said, “so if it fails, all the value and effort invested in the battery up to that point are wasted.”

High charging current boosts battery performance

Manufacturers generally give new batteries their first charge with low currents, on the theory that this will create the most robust SEI layer. But there’s a downside: Charging at low currents is time-consuming and costly and doesn’t necessarily yield optimal results. So, when recent studies suggested that faster charging with higher currents does not degrade battery performance, it was exciting news.

But researchers wanted to dig deeper. The charging current is just one of dozens of factors that go into the formation of SEI during the first charge. Testing all possible combinations of them in the lab to see which one worked best is an overwhelming task.

To whittle the problem down to manageable size, the research team used scientific machine learning to identify which factors are most important in achieving good results. To their surprise, just two of them – the temperature and current at which the battery is charged – stood out from all the rest.

Experiments confirmed that charging at high currents has a huge impact, increasing the lifespan of the average test battery by 50%. It also deactivated a much higher percentage of lithium up front – about 30%, compared to 9% with previous methods – but that turned out to have a positive effect.

Removing more lithium ions up front is a bit like scooping water out of a full bucket before carrying it, Cui said. The extra headspace in the bucket decreases the amount of water splashing out along the way. In similar fashion, deactivating more lithium ions during SEI formation frees up headspace in the positive electrode and allows the electrode to cycle in a more efficient way, improving subsequent performance.

“Brute force optimization by trial-and-error is routine in manufacturing – how should we perform the first charge, and what is the winning combination of factors?” Chueh said. “Here, we didn’t just want to identify the best recipe for making a good battery; we wanted to understand how and why it works. This understanding is crucial for finding the best balance between battery performance and manufacturing efficiency.”

This research was funded by the Toyota Research Institute through its Accelerated Materials Design and Discovery program.

Research Report:Data-driven analysis of battery formation reveals the role of electrode utilization in extending cycle life

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SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

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